The last time anyone proclaimed the end of science — at least, this is what I hear — was just before the arrival of relativity and quantum theory. Abstruse Goose’s brave new islands, quantum gravity and dark energy, are going to require new physics, and new physics is like seeing outside the optical, hearing outside the audible, and suddenly living in 27 dimensions. Woofies.
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In the summer of 1993, just weeks before bulldozers began rolling in for the largest transportation project in Boston’s history–the Central Artery/Third Harbor Tunnel–archaeologists discovered what appeared to be two 19th century privies and a cistern along the old waterfront. Unable to come up with funding to dig them, Boston archaeologist Martin Dudek and his colleagues decided to excavate the sites on their own time, recovering nearly 3000 artifacts, from leather shoes and cosmetic jars to a host of imposing looking syringes.
It now turns out that the privies and cistern belonged to a thriving Victorian-era brothel. In an ongoing research project, Boston University archaeologist Mary Beaudry and her students are now analyzing the artifacts, combing old census records and other documents, and shedding new light on the lives of the women at 27 and 29 Endicott Street. Continue reading
The procedure, developed in the late ’50s, is called fecal transplantation. Those of you who watch Grey’s Anatomy will have heard of it. And, yes, it is what you think it is. A physician takes poop from one person, and then he puts it into another. Don’t worry. The recipient doesn’t have to swallow the donor’s feces (an act that might put a positive spin on the phrase ‘eat my sh*t’). Blessedly, it goes in through the rectum instead.
“Why, for God’s sake why!?” you ask. Well, I’ll tell you. Poop is teeming with microbes. The typical human gut houses trillions of bacteria — more bacteria than the human body has cells. Together they form the gut’s “microbiome.” These bugs keep you happy and healthy. They aid in digestion, immunity, and much more. Continue reading
Time flies; it passes; it marches on. Time can be hard, ripe, rough or sharp. It can be saved, spent, managed.
I make dinner reservations ahead of time, and push back deadlines. I look forward to Christmas in New York. My teenaged years are over (woohoo!).
‘Time’ is the most common noun in English, and all of the various ways I talk about time feel…right. But other languages have different (and to me, peculiar) ways of describing the concept. In Indonesian, for example, verbs don’t have tenses: ‘I sit’ equals ‘I sat’ equals ‘I am going to sit’. In Aymara, a language spoken in the Andean highlands in South America, the past is said to be in front of you, and the future behind you. Mandarin speakers use vertical metaphors: earlier events are ‘up’ (shàng) whereas later events are ‘down’ (xià).
Do these sorts of linguistic variations reflect differences in the way we think?
Galaxy Zoo — the citizen science project with hundreds of thousands of citizens classifying galaxies, catching supernovae, mapping the moon, finding solar storms, and so on far into the night – has sprouted a new project called Old Weather. The reason old weather is more interesting than, say, old socks, is that yesterday’s weather is grist for tomorrow’s climate model: no climate model is any good without masses of data. So some hardy soul scanned the Royal Navy’s logbooks of 238 ships — the day-to-day weather in the early part of the last century — put the scans up on oldweather.org, and you transcribe one page at a time: neat entries, spidery handwriting, HMS Tarantula, 19th day of December, 1919, winds N, blue sky, 10:45 a.m., weighed and proceeded from Hong Mun heading for Canton – taking notes on all of it, next page, next day, same neat handwriting whose “4’s” look a little like “7’s,” and before you know it, you’re in, hook, line, and sinker. So to speak. Continue reading
If you listen, you can hear them talking. Sometimes the conversation is loud and clear. In On the Heavens, Aristotle argues that the Earth has no motions. It neither orbits the Sun nor turns on an axis. Just under two thousand years later, Galileo upbraids him. In Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, he presents a fictional debate, entrusting the Copernican argument to the capable Salviati and consigning the Aristotelian to the credulous Simplicio. When their discussion reaches the subject of the motions of the Earth, Simplicio triumphantly produces a copy of On the Heavens (“I keep it always in my pocket,” which, in Galileo-speak, suggests: He would). Salviati then proceeds to demolish Aristotle’s reasoning by using his own words against him.
You feel lousy. Some old lady sneezed on you in the subway. Now you’re achy and tired and feverish. Face it, Bud. You’ve got the flu. Better just crawl back into bed.
What’s that? You have to fly to London? You’ve got an important meeting with a client? Well, I guess I can’t stop you. But someone else can. It’s the airport fever police. They spotted your hot head with their thermal scanner as you made your way into the airport. Continue reading
Nature certainly works in dark, mysterious ways. A few weeks ago, we marveled here at the seemingly miraculous return of 35 million sockeye salmon to Canada’s Fraser River, after many people feared that the run was nearing extinction.
As Canadians were rejoicing, however, fisheries scientists were frantically working their chalkboards, trying to figure out what on earth was going on. Now someone has come up with a theory. The greatest Fraser River run in nearly a century may have been due to two events: the eruption of Kasatochi volcano in the Aleutian Islands in August 2008, and the winds of a perfect storm. Continue reading
